YNOT – If news out of two tech giants this month is any indication, the battle over who will provide tools for searching content on social networks is just now heating up. No surprises on the frontrunners, as Bing and Google appear poised for combat over a meaningful place in the social networking frenzy.Microsoft drew first blood last week when it announced at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that it had secured deals with both Facebook and Twitter. The deals are both non-exclusive, but will enable Microsoft’s surging Bing.com search engine to provide real-time search results from content on the two biggest names in social networking.
Google, not to be left out, has now announced through Google Labs that it has its own social networking search tool under development. Google Social Search will allow Google users to include in search results relevant content from established contacts – but there’s a catch. To include results from social networks, the Google user first must be logged into his or her Google account; plus, due to privacy concerns, Google Social Search will only return results from content that is publicly available to search engines.
Google developers writing on a Google blog provided an example of how their new Social Search feature might benefit a typical Google user.
“When I do a simple query for [New York], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading ‘Results from people in your social circle for New York,’” they wrote. “I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking ‘Show options’ on the results page and clicking ‘Social.’”
By including content authored by a user’s social circle, Google hopes the results it returns will offer a new layer of relevancy and interest to searchers; for example, someone searching for information about a new product might like to hear what his or her friends had to say about that same product.
The Google Social Search features have not yet been integrated into Google by default, but curious users can try it out right now by visiting the experiments page at Google Labs, which can be found at www.google.com/experimental/. Users are allowed to activate one “experiment” at a time.
When Google Social Search is activated, and the user is logged into a valid Google account, Google will return its special results at the end of any standard search results page. This special results section will only show up if a given Google search finds relevant matches from your social contacts.
Social contacts are established from a variety of sources, including contacts lists on Gmail, Google Talk, Twitter, and Friendfeed. And while Google has reached an agreement with Twitter, possibly in connection with the new Social Search experiment, it has not yet announced any special deals with Facebook, where information is often kept private by default.
“All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the Web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to,” Google wrote on one of its blogs. “What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant.”
